Pushing the Envelope on Organizational Effectiveness: Combining an Old Framework and a Sharp Tool

Abstract

For nearly 30 years organizational effectiveness has been a central topic in the study of organizations, but the relevant literature has been characterized by controversy, confusion, and ambiguity. Moreover, powerful institutional and political forces buffet our contemporary public and nonprofit practitioners with narrowly drawn models that emphasize efficiency and productivity at the expense of other dimensions of effectiveness. This article reinvigorates a holistic model of organizational effectiveness, the competing values framework, by combining it with a newer analytic tool, data envelopment analysis, in a study of public university research institutes. This study shows that the framework and the tool are both eminently useful and that they work well in combination. We illustrate that some organizations may need to use a broader set of performance data to take full advantage of this more robust approach to assessing organizational effectiveness. The article concludes with suggestions for their continued use in subsequent effectiveness studies.

Keywords:

• measuring performance
• organizational effectiveness
• performance data usage
• time parameters